Congress’s Response to Infrastructure Problems Amounts to a Patchwork Repair

Transit workers participate in a rally on Capitol Hill May 20 to urge Congress to replenish the Highway Trust Fund.

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Amtrak Train 177 limped into Washington’s Union Station at 4:30 a.m. last Thursday, some four hours behind schedule, air conditioning and lights off, towed by a replacement locomotive after the original one gave out.

It was a fitting metaphor for the failure of members of Congress in the Capitol, just visible outside the train station’s doors, to deal with the infrastructure problems of a nation with a transportation grid steadily sliding backwards.

Those lawmakers will try this week to perform their most basic task in addressing America’s transportation needs, which is renewing funding for the Highway Trust Fund. That’s the basic account states and localities around the country rely on to not just fix roads and bridges but to make repairs and improvements to mass-transit systems.

But Congress is doing the bare minimum needed to keep the trust fund from running out of money, and just in the nick of time. What’s more, lawmakers aren’t responding in a manner that can assure local governments and businesses that their elected leaders are capable of serious long-range thinking on this most basic of government functions.

Ideally, the Highway Trust Fund would be renewed for several years at a time. Congress instead is working on a renewal for just eight months, enough to get past this fall’s election but not long enough to allow states and cities to plan projects with any confidence.

Moreover, lawmakers will fail to resolve the trust fund’s basic problem, which is that it operates under a funding mechanism devised 58 years ago that simply doesn’t work any longer. That basic funding stream is the federal tax charged on each gallon of gas. The tax hasn’t changed since 1993. In the years since, fuel-efficient cars burn fewer gallons of gas, meaning drivers kick fewer dollars into the fund; meanwhile, the need for basic improvements in aged infrastructure has risen.

As a result, funding has fallen behind spending for the last 14 years. By next month, without action, the trust fund would have to stop sending money out to states to reimburse them for highway projects. By this fall, the Senate Budget Committee says, mass-transit funding would be in similar straits.

What are the consequences of Congress’ failure to get serious about fixing the nation’s infrastructure? Here’s one example: Recent testimony before Congress indicates that the average age of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority’s rail bridges is more than 80 years old; 103 bridges are more than a century old. Meanwhile, economic competitors abroad are building new airports and high-speed rail lines.

What Congress is attempting to do this week amounts to a patchwork repair to the highway trust fund, not a long-term overhaul. Five years ago, a study group of public- and private-sector experts convened by the Bipartisan Policy Center concluded:

“Existing systems are dated, in many cases strained to (or beyond) capacity, and increasingly fall short of delivering transportation services at the level of quality, performance and efficiency the American public demands. Current funding mechanisms are not sufficient to maintain existing infrastructure, let along provide the investments needed to expand and modernize our transportation systems.”

That analysis holds today–and nothing happening in Congress right now figures to change it.

In this video, Jerry Seib discusses why members of Congress won’t likely be going home for the August recess in a blaze of glory:

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